The Ontario government is planning a total revamp of the province’s garbage-handling programs, from blue boxes to fluorescent bulbs to kitchen scraps, hoping to cut the amount of waste we make by 80 per cent over the next 35 years.

It’s also hoping to make manufacturers pay for the whole thing, by some process that’ll be way less politically disastrous than the “eco-fee” sales taxes that knocked the Liberals for a loop six years ago when it turned out consumers hated paying extra disposal fees for stuff they were only just buying.

The scheme is laid out in a document from the Ministry of the Environment and Climate Change called Strategy for a Waste-Free Ontario: Building the Circular Economy, which has been in development for years and is now in its final round of public comments. The notion of a “circular economy” is a trendy version of the familiar “reduce, reuse, recycle” — use less raw material, throw less away, mine the stuff you do throw away for the parts that can be reprocessed into useful things again.

We want to “close the resource loop,” the strategy says, using even less raw material and reprocessing even more, so the same atoms can keep going round and round. To make it happen, we’ll have “Government leadership, producer responsibility, and consumer education and awareness (to) enable market mechanisms that drive higher resource productivity, innovation and economic growth.”

Well, maybe. The strategy points out that recycling is good for the economy because it creates jobs. It also points out that municipalities are spending more and more on waste disposal, which is a problem. But recycling creates jobs because it’s expensive. Or it’s expensive because it creates jobs — depends how you look at it. Either way, that’s where the money goes. Reprocessing stuff is more labour-intensive than burying it.

Don’t get me wrong: Recycling is worth doing. Avoiding new landfills is worth doing. Making the most of the resources we extract from the earth is worth doing. But recycling is not magic.

Anyway, the government will make a point of buying more recycled stuff, and more stuff that is designed to be recycled when it’s no longer useful. It will also make a lot of new rules.

In practice, recycling old stuff often makes no financial sense. Provincial law requires cities and towns to run recycling programs for paper and packaging alongside regular garbage pickup; selling the recyclables makes some money back, but the programs are subsidized by property taxes. Across Ontario, about half of household refuse gets recycled or composted or otherwise diverted.

Industrial, commercial and institutional garbage generators (“IC&I,” in the jargon) are under no such requirements and at last check they diverted only about a quarter of their trash. Whenever there’s a controversy about a new dump or a major expansion of an old one, like on Carp Road or in Carlsbad Springs, it’s almost always over a place to put IC&I garbage.

We’re going to do something about that, the province promises. O, but what? “The province will consult with stakeholders on how to determine the best approach to increase diversion for paper and packaging in the IC&I sectors,” the strategy says. So there’s that.

This might include provincewide “disposal bans” on some kinds of garbage, straight-up rules against throwing certain things into landfills. Food, recyclables and fluorescent light bulbs are tops on the list of possibilities. Ottawa has a bylaw requiring homeowners to separate recyclables from regular garbage, but in practice it’s not enforced by punishment harsher than a note. Outright bans will be more invasive.

Bans will have to be matched with reasonable ways of recycling the things being banned or else people will just sneak them into the trash anyway. To that end, another part of the plan is standardizing household recycling, withdrawing it from individual municipalities’ control to “harmonize the materials collected across Ontario and the type of collection activities that are undertaken.”

If you’ve moved cities, you know that mastering the recycling system is an amazing chore. Plastic bags? No plastic bags? Wait, there are two different bins here? Milk cartons are … plastic? Even though they’re obviously made of paper? In Ottawa, about one blue box in five has something in it that doesn’t belong there.

Standardizing recycling across the province would probably help and might save money in the end, but it won’t be cheap. There’ll have to be education campaigns, hundreds of collection and processing contracts to revisit, “stranded assets” to be disposed of. The province wants this done within five years.

And then there are the eco-fees, which shall never again be called eco-fees. They’re meant to cover the costs of getting rid of tricky garbage like electronics, batteries, paint, tires. A good idea as far as that goes. The fees have also covered the costs of quasi-independent bureaucracies called stewardship organizations, some of which have used some of the money to lobby the government. Not so great.

The stewardship organizations are toast, due to be “wound up.” The fees as they are will also be toast, on a schedule to be determined in plans written by the government later. But since the plans in question are about making producers take even more responsibility for the materials and packaging they use, don’t expect the costs to go away, only to be hidden better.

People are very sensitive to being bossed around with their garbage and the province has screwed this stuff up before. Let’s hope this strategy pans out better than the last one.

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